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Re:EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides by darkerside on Sunday April 29, 2018 @06:27PM (#16954261)
A century of tremendous progress afforded by capitalism begs to differ. Anyway, I'm not saying free market capitalism is a panacea, but it's generated wealth and value for consumers in spades.
Re:EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides by gkya on Sunday April 29, 2018 @06:46PM (#16954332)
And I'm not saying it's evil, but that without regulation it will favour itself over the consumer all the time, except when interests happen to align (and it does not, in most cases).
Re:EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides by darkerside on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @08:30PM (#16982358)
The market doesn't favor "itself", that doesn't mean anything. There may be a paradigm you're missing here.

There's a confirmation bias at work. There are infinite examples of the market working suboptimally for one consumer, a group of consumers, or consumers as a whole. But the entire platform is built upon creating value for consumers. People choose to pay for goods and services they want. In another system, they could be assigned arbitrarily. Or even completely unavailable. Capitalism created things you'd never expect, like broadband internet access and social networking to name a couple.

Re:EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides by gkya on Thursday May 03, 2018 @12:16PM (#16987264)
Market is made up of selfish entities. The good that's done is a side effect. I do not mean that pejoratively.

It certainly is in the interest of enterprises to provide value to consumers. But so too is to do that as cheaply as possible, in order to have the largest margins possible. The one to sell for cheapest will prevail. Even if that means making people work for the bare minimum that'll keep them alive and poisoning them with murderous materials in subhuman working conditions. Even if that means starving an entire ecosystem to death to grow some grains or whatnot. That's where regulation kicks in. It sets the ground for competition without harming the rest of the world.

We do not disagree. But you're believing mistakenly that I am criticising capitalism. While I instead am telling that like every powerful resource, capital too needs to be heavily controlled and supervised. If you live somewhere where the market and capitalism is not doing shady things to cut costs and sell cheaper, tell me which utopian place/planet you are at, so that I can join you lot. But in the real world lots of starving hands touch everything we wear and tap and click. Regulation is necessary so that one's life don't cost many others' lives.

Re:EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides by darkerside on Thursday May 03, 2018 @07:21PM (#16990889)
Yeah, I think we actually are pretty close to the same page. I just think, in light of the tremendous amount of progress over the past years, often discounted by a media audience that is fed a healthy diet of panic (this brought to you by capitalism, FTR!), capitalism has been an overall win. And I don't know of any other system that could have produced anything close to what we have.

I guess a lot of it comes down to whether we are satisfied with the state of humanity, and whether we recognize past progress as an overall good.